


Fatal Flaws

by cairn



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Angst, At times I hate myself, F/M, this is one of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 23:11:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4498284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cairn/pseuds/cairn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Balthier decides to destroy the Sun-Cryst instead of Reddas. Everything breaks down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fatal Flaws

**Author's Note:**

> Written a while ago, right after I finished the game, in a cloud of angsty reflection. Apologies for the unendingly long sentences.

This is the moment when everything breaks down.  
He’s flying through the air like a bat with a hole in its wing, and she’s trying – oh, she’s trying so desperately – to reach his hand before they’re both pulled away, and she’s pulling at the arms around her waist and screaming his name as though he can hear through the shroud of Mist that is enveloping them all. Vaan is trying to yell out to him, something about airships and Penelo is starting to cry because they all know that the leading man is doing something that he shouldn’t, and this story could be a tragedy, and don’t they all know what happens to leading men in tragedies (and this would be his fatal flaw, she thinks, this flair for the dramatic, and she screams out all the wilder for it). Basch is the heavy arms around her, weighted by the armor she bargained for so desperately with the vendor because sometimes seventeen dark crystals isn’t enough for something as precious as a protective layer around someone’s too-thin skin. Fran is on the floor, pulled down by something primal and instinctive in her people, and she is covering her face with her hands like the claws that mark the ends of her fingers, she is tucking her legs into her chest because she knows this shroud is funereal. And Ashe is pounding on the armor of the man she has entrusted to save her life, over and over, shrieking, wishing for once he would let her be stupid – let her choose the minute she wished to die, throw her hands out and pull this man away from his foolhardy journey.

This is the moment when he realizes he loves her.  
She is screaming, she is reaching out her hands to him and he watches as her face is contorted and she is streaked with sweat and dirt and a thin film of salty water that the breeze has whipped into all of their faces – and by the gods she is beautiful. It is like the moments when the light winks off the front of the Strahl’s cockpit and he is momentarily blinded by the sunlight, and he closes his eyes to feel his hands on the controls more steadily, the feel of worn leather and warm metal beneath his hands, except now the light is from the crystal he is driving this sword into (and it is Save the Queen, this sword, and he could almost laugh at the notion, at the memory of her face when he presented it to her after a quiet word with the vendor, telling her its name and watching her try to not react) and instead of the feeling of his hands on the Strahl it is the feeling of his hands on the sword that will save her life, the feeling of her eyes on his back and the warmth of her ring on his finger. 

This is the moment when she knows she will live a widow.  
She sees Rasler’s back on Baltheir’s, she watches them both walk away from her, bent to the wind, a cape on one and nothing but a leather backing on the other, and she bends over Basch’s arms because the knowledge is crushing. Everyone is screaming, but now it’s mostly blocked out by the rush of blood and wind in her ears, like the world is pounding on her eardrums in gusts and snippets of Penelo’s shrieking, like the whirlwind of nightmares she awoke from when she dreamt of Nabradia, dreams of a land she never saw, when a prince wore white armor and emerged streaked with dirt and red, and the screams of the people he must have watched fall around him that echo deafeningly in her ears when she awoke and clutched the pillow beside her as though it was his arms, his body, his very soul. She pulls at Basch’s arm once more, defeated, as the light becomes blinding and she shuts her eyes and feels the wind pull them all away.

This is the moment  
He is seeing stars on the back of his eyelids, he is choking against the pressure – the pressure, gods, like he’d fallen deep into the ocean and couldn’t swim back up, the self-same as when, as a child, his brother had dared him to swim to the bottom of their pool (ten yards, his father had said proudly, to test all sorts of projects in) and he’d popped both his ears and got a bloody nose, age seven, his father had been furious – and now it was he who condemned his father, for far greater a sin than a dare taken, and gods the light was blinding, the thought of Archades so far away, of Fran, the Strahl, of her – of her, of her, of her, and he thinks of the first time she walked up (kidnap me), the first time the ring he’d stolen lay heavy on his finger, the first time she had listened to his words about the nethicite, the time in the Strahl when he’d leant in and she hadn’t moved away and he thought of her, of her, of her and this is the moment when


End file.
